Retro Studios

History

Retro Studios was founded on September 21, 1998 in Austin, Texas, by Jeff Spangenberg, who had previously co-founded Iguana Entertainment. The founding was structured as an alliance with Nintendo, which was developing the upcoming GameCube and sought to establish a Western studio capable of producing games for an older demographic. The arrangement gave Retro access to Nintendo's resources while Spangenberg assembled a team of experienced developers from the American game industry.

The studio's early years were troubled. Retro began development on four simultaneous projects — NFL Retro Football, a racing game (Thunder Rally), an action game, and a fourth title — but none progressed satisfactorily. In early 2001, Retro cancelled NFL Retro Football and Thunder Rally, laying off approximately twenty employees. The remaining projects were in various states of difficulty. Nintendo's investment had not yet produced results, and the relationship between Spangenberg and Nintendo management had grown strained.

The trajectory changed in 2000 when Shigeru Miyamoto visited the Austin studio. Disappointed by most of what he saw, Miyamoto was nonetheless impressed by one element: a technology demonstration using the MetaForce engine. He suggested to the team that the engine could serve as the foundation for a new game in the Metroid series — a franchise that had been dormant since Super Metroid in 1994. The Metroid IP was offered to Retro, and the studio reorganized around the project. Producer Kensuke Tanabe from Nintendo's Japan office became the key liaison, and director and designer Yoshio Sakamoto oversaw the Japanese side of the development.

Metroid Prime, released November 17, 2002 for GameCube, was a radical reinterpretation of a franchise defined by 2D gameplay. Retro's team translated the exploration and atmosphere of Super Metroid into a first-person perspective — not a first-person shooter in the conventional sense, but a first-person adventure in which navigation, environmental scanning, and puzzle-solving took precedence over combat. The visual design of the alien world of Tallon IV, the ambient sound design, and the quality of the hardware-specific engineering all exceeded what most outside observers had expected from a studio producing its first title. The game sold over 2.8 million copies and received near-universal critical acclaim.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, released in November 2004, expanded on its predecessor with a parallel light-and-dark-world structure and a multiplayer mode. The game sold somewhat less than Metroid Prime but maintained the series' standard for atmospheric, exploration-driven design. By this point Retro had completed its transition from troubled startup to one of Nintendo's most trusted first-party studios. Jeff Spangenberg had left the company in 2002, and Nintendo completed its formal acquisition of the studio in May 2002 for $1 million in stock.

After the Metroid Prime trilogy concluded with Corruption in 2007 (developed by Retro), the studio moved into the Donkey Kong franchise with Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010, Wii) and Tropical Freeze (2014, Wii U / Switch). Both were well-received reconstructions of the SNES-era franchise's side-scrolling platformer identity. In 2019, Nintendo announced Retro Studios as the developer of Metroid Prime 4, returning the studio to the franchise that established its reputation.